How we evolved a Services Procurement programme through partnership and co-design

How we evolved a Services Procurement programme through partnership and co-design

Summary

Expanding into Services Procurement for compounded benefits

A long-standing client for Pontoon needed to harness their Services Procurement programme to control spend, increase visibility, and encourage uniform SOW processes. This client is a hospital network, healthcare IT solutions and service provider to others in the industry.

The challenge

Deepening our understanding

As we began this journey, we started meeting with the client to better understand their targeted outcomes. The meetings enabled us to co-design a solution that would help the client achieve these targets. During the discovery period, it became clear that there was an opportunity to increase visibility across their Services Procurement workforce. Existing processes were not standardised, impeding their ability to control SOWs and SOW worker visibility was extremely limited.

How we helped

Creating alignment focused on adding value

Our key stakeholders agreed that we needed to collectively spend time getting to know the end clients and their SOW buying habits before we could implement a fully outsourced brand.

Together, we built a strong business case based on the evidence we collected during discovery that demonstrated the need for an outsourced Services Procurement solution. Our teams held design thinking sessions that resulted in a detailed walk-through covering every step in the ideal-state workflow. By partnering closely with our key stakeholders during this process, we co-created the entire experience for their managers and candidates. The complete process included a responsibility matrix for each and every different step.

This full layout led us to conclude that Services Procurement would be the ideal solution for our client. We leveraged our existing MSP relationship to work through change management best practices and our successful track record as an existing service provider. The most significant targeted outcome for our client was the projected cost savings opportunity of 4-7%.

Even with startup costs, year two maintenance costs and operating costs after that, our client will still see savings of over $4 million per year. This would be a remarkable improvement from the unmanaged rates in the past. It would create more regulation across the supplier base. The client would also benefit from more consistency, engagement guidelines, programme compliance and risk avoidance. Each group would see benefits, from the users to procurement, finance, and suppliers.

Impact

Successful go-live and plans for growth

The policies put in place through our programme came with baked-in parameters to increase the awareness and usability of the programme. We introduced policies that would raise a warning if terms were broken. Approved by the client’s executive team, the policies also stipulated consequences in case of a second breach. If users continued to operate outside the programme, their access to SOWs was revoked entirely.

We went live with the SOW in Q2 2022, and have seen early success across the programme. Next, we will be working on gaining more visibility and identifying categories that Pontoon can support and manage along with other strategic categories. We will focus on growth and continuing this journey.

Related Case Study
Services Procurement